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April 5, 2006

British adventurer waits for all-clear from Russia

by Sam Savage

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Briton attempting to walk around the
world is stuck in Russia's far northeast waiting for permission
to continue after being detained for crossing the border
illegally, an embassy spokesman said on Wednesday.

Former paratrooper Karl Bushby and fellow U.S. traveler
Dimitri Kieffer were stopped on April 1 on the remote Chukotka
peninsula. They had made a perilous two-week journey across the
Bering Strait -- a sea ice bridge between Russia and Alaska.

"Karl is being accommodated in Lavrentia and is free to
wander around the town. According to him, people are being very
friendly, some of the local police are in fact quite overawed
at his feat," a British embassy spokesman in Moscow said.

"He is now waiting for some more senior Russian officials
to come and interview him."

Bushby, 37, set off from the tip of South America in 1998
and hopes to return to Britain in 2009, after a journey of some
36,000 miles. He teamed up with Kieffer, an endurance racer,
for the crossing in Alaska.

If Russia allows Bushby to continue his journey, his
planned route takes him south into Mongolia, through Kazakhstan
and Ukraine, on into Europe and back to Britain.